I think what turned me off Twitter mostly is the fact that they have such a narrow vision for what their company can be, and that their vision doesn't support my preferred use of their service.

Twitter is turning away from being an ecosystem that supported lots of 3rd-party developers and novel use cases, and becoming a very closed system. They're turning into a publishing system that's more focused on selling access to advertisers than providing a democratic platform for communication. Which is their right, of course. I just choose to opt out of that kind of service.

Alpha.App.Net (ADN) is taking a very different approach to building a very similar service. ADN lets me pay for their service up front and it actively supports a 3rd-party developer ecosystem. To me, there's much more potential for cool stuff to happen at ADN, and there are certainly interesting people to follow there and interesting conversations happening. So, I reward ADN with my money and attention and I remain a very passive and occasional observer of Twitter.

As for your postscript... oh, yeah. I am painfully aware of how scattered my online presence has become. Frankly, I'm amazed you found this site. :-)

I've been trying to regain some focus lately, and I've settled on this site for information management-related stuff and stumax.com for personal stuff, and I'm getting around to shutting down the other sites that I've abandoned over the years. I always loved the creative and technical challenge of setting up a new WordPress site, which is why I started so many of them. But now I want to focus more on content than presentation. After all, what good is having a snazzy-looking blog if you never fill it with anything interesting?